Locus, March 2013

by Locus Publications

  •

  And now for something completely familiar and quite well done: an anthology of original standard-model SF stories. Edge of Infinity is editor Jonathan Strahan’s follow-up and companion to Engineering Infinity (2010). For this volume, he assembled thirteen new pieces from a mix of established and newer voices. Their charge was to produce stories reflecting the editor’s notion of a ‘‘Fourth Generation’’ of SF, whose ideas and settings fit between the ‘‘mundane’’ and space operatic/interstellar possibility spaces: ‘‘stories set firmly in an industrialised, colonised Solar System during a time when starflight is yet to emerge.’’ Beyond the variety of middle-distance settled-solar-system futures, we get what I find even more interesting: portraits of social and psychological adaptations to these exotic and challenging environments. Nor are the protagonists always human, whether baseline or adapted-and enhanced – a couple of stories include AI characters at least as compelling as their meat counterparts, and we get an appealing alien neighbor as well.

  But to start with the humans: The ‘‘industrialized’’ part of Strahan’s recipe encourages consideration of a future full of jobs and leads to some Allen-Steelean portraits of working stiffs, workplaces, and occupations that range from the expected to the quite exotic. In the lead story, ‘‘The Girl-Thing Who Went Out for Sushi’’, Pat Cadigan focuses on the culture of those radically transformed workers who have been physically optimized to live and function in the space around Jupiter, and she opts for the immersion method of (non) exposition: no infodumps here, just skillful deployment of workplace/subcultural argot. So we get to figure out that ‘‘two-steppers’’ are more or less original-equipment humans, AKA featherless bipeds, while ‘‘sushi’’ are various kinds and degrees of transforms, named for the kinds of terrestrial sea-life they resemble. The class and kind tensions (altered and unaltered, company and employee, Dirt and space) mesh nicely with the political system and situation that runs in the background, a variation on the familiar inner-and outer-worlds rivalry. And the surprise – to the narrator as well as the reader – has to do with even bigger changes on the way.

  In ‘‘The Road to NPS’’, Sandra McDonald & Stephen D. Covey offer another blue-collar story, this time a kind of truck-driver-on-Europa saga about a guy desperate to open a surface-route for freight through some very treacherous territory. The dangers turn out to go considerably beyond the expected hazards – hard vacuum, near-zero-Kelvin temperatures, water-snow volcanoes, fissures – and again the climax points to new possibilities opening up. It’s not much less hazardous in near-Earth space. Kristine Kathryn Rusch’s ‘‘Safety Tests’’ details a day in the life of the guy with the unenviable task of taking potential spacecraft pilots on their qualifying flights, with all the increased risks one can imagine and a few one might not have thought of.

  Returning to that attractively various gas-giant neighborhood, Elizabeth Bear’s ‘‘The Deeps of the Sky’’ features an alien protagonist whose home environment is the atmosphere/ocean of what is probably Jupiter. The keynote here is cooperation across boundaries of Otherness, as the sky-miner Stormchases risks his life (and the possibility of breeding) to rescue a human exploratory probe full of creatures made of nasty, poisonous stuff like water and oxygen.

  Artists are workers, too. In ‘‘Macy Minnot’s Last Christmas on Dione, Ring Racing, Fiddler’s Green, the Potter’s Garden’’, Paul McAuley revisits his Quiet War future history, several generations after Gardens of the Sun (2010), to once again combine a bit of exotic travelogue (the title could be part of an itinerary) with a consideration of what creative folk might be able to get up to with the new materials and techniques available in a new environment. Alastair Reynolds’s ‘‘Vainglory’’ deals with another sculptor, this time of entire asteroids, as well as what might be seen, from a psychotic point of view, as a kind of performance art. In ‘‘Obelisk’’, Stephen Baxter considers yet another urge to build and mold an environment in a long-line story of severely mixed emotions, motives, and cultural imperatives – primarily remorse and ambition – on a 22nd-century Chinese-settled Mars.

  Computers gotta work, too. John Barnes’s ‘‘Swift as a Dream and Fleeting as a Sigh’’ is an AI therapist’s memories of how some sessions with a client eventually led to it becoming the brains of a starship. Along the way there are observations on how evolutionary pressures might operate on even the simplest machine intelligences and how an advanced AI can, despite its vastly faster processing speed, still be fallible. The AI personalities in Gwyneth Jones’s ‘‘Bricks, Sticks, Straw’’ are only semi-autonomous Remote Presence packages stationed in the Jovian system and accidentally cut off from the human operators of which they are approximation – something which does not prevent them from having a sense of self and responding to isolation with a range of coping mechanisms that range from cocooning to catatonia to paranoid delusion. Closer to home, in Hannu Rajaniemi’s ‘‘Tyche and the Ants’’, an orphaned superchild lives on the moon, with only her baby-sitting AI and her imaginary friends for company, until unexpected visitors intrude.

  It’s not possible – or, at least, not graceful – to put every story under the world-of-work rubric. An Owomoyela’s ‘‘Water Rights’’ is partly about work, and it does focus on the less romantic, physical-infrastructure side of things. The populations of near-Earth habitats are even shorter of water than the people on the ground, and when the supply goes down, they face the problem of how to manage competing needs – not just of the many versus the few, but necessity versus luxury, food versus flowers. Finally, it’s about cooperation and long-term benefits. As one character says, ‘‘Darling, it’s space. We help each other or we float dead into nothing.’’

  In ‘‘Drive’’, James S.A. Corey traces the backstory of how the viewpoint character came to find himself in a familiar science fictional pickle, hard up against some laws of physics. It’s part relationship story, part colonial-society portrait, part traditional hard-SF puzzle that exercises an infrequently-used option. I’d name one of the story’s obvious ancestors, but that would be considered a spoiler.

  The book finishes up with a wonderful strange-society portrait. The citizens of the deep-underground Mercurian settler culture of Bruce Sterling’s ‘‘The Peak of Eternal Light’’ are transformed socially and culturally rather than physiologically, and the story is less about their material situation (though that is as striking as any free-floating space habitat) than their curious gender politics. In fact, the Mercurians see themselves as the properly human humans, and some aspire to become not so much star-travelers as star-dwellers, living in the holy fire of the sun. Both the exuberant prose and the starchy crypto-Victorian flavor of the society had me thinking of John C. Wright’s Golden Age trilogy, which I suspect might be getting a mild ribbing.

  Maybe these stories do represent a ‘‘fourth generation’’ of SF, or maybe they are just a fresh set of expressions of the story-building possibilities offered by traditional hard-SF techniques and the current understanding of our endlessly surprising solar system. (And that ‘‘just’’ conceals a world of writerly research, energy, and ingenuity.) In either case, the results suggest that there’s plenty of meat left on the bones of the old paradigm.

  –Russell Letson

  Return to In This Issue listing.

  LOCUS LOOKS AT BOOKS: STEFAN DZIEMIANOWICZ

  Red Moon, Benjamin Percy (Grand Central 978-1-4555-0166-3, $25.99, 544pp, hc) May 2013.

  NOS4A2, Joe Hill (Morrow 978-0-06-220057-0, $28.99, 704pp, hc) May 2013.

  Motherless Child, Glen Hirshberg (Earthling Publications 978-0-9838071-1-7, $40.00, 260pp, tp) October 2012. [Order from Earthling Publications, PO Box 413, Northborough, MA 01532; .]

  Revenge, Yoko Ogawa; translated by Stephen Snyder. (Picador 978-0-312-67466-5, $14.00, 176pp, tp) January 2013.

  Benjamin Percy’s remarkable new novel shows how a gifted writer can use one of the oldest and most overworked themes
in supernatural fiction as the foundation for an imaginative and refreshingly original story. Red Moon is set in a slightly alternate world where shapeshifters known as lycans (the term ‘‘werewolf’’ is never used) have lived among so-called normal human beings since time immemorial. I say ‘‘so-called’’ because how we define ‘‘normal’’ when dealing with issues of race, ethnicity, and personal identity is one of the novel’s recurring themes.

  Lycanthropy is caused by infection with lobos, a prion for which Percy has worked out a detailed and convincing neuropathology. It affects the parts of the brain that regulate anger and hunger. It can only be passed through birth, or transmitted sexually or through a bite. Since lycanthropic transformation causes stretching and breaking of the tissues during shapeshifting, it is in the saliva of transformed lycans. A bite that breaks the skin is invariably infectious.

  Although lycan attacks are rare, fear of them runs high in the non-lycan population. In contemporary America, where most of the story is set, lycans live the lives of second-class citizens. Known lycans are ghettoized in their own schools and communities and self-medication with lupex – a pharmacologic mix of psychotropic drugs and silver distributed freely by the government – is mandatory. This doesn’t sit well with the lycan population, and a lycan resistance movement launches sporadic terrorist attacks to call attention to the struggle for lycan equality in a world that sees them as not human.

  The novel opens with Keith Gamble driving his son Patrick to the airport. Keith is being deployed on reserve duty to the Lupine Republic, a state situated between Russia and Finland and established in 1948 as a lycan homeland. The republic is rich with uranium and American military forces are occupying it to protect uranium mines crucial to American industry. Patrick has the misfortune to board one of three planes that are about to be brought down on American soil by carefully coordinated onboard lycan resistance attacks. He’s the only survivor to walk away from the carnage.

  Succeeding chapters introduce the rest of the primary characters in Percy’s tale: Claire Forrester, a teenage lycan on the run from government agents who killed her parents immediately following the airplane attacks; Chase Williams, the opportunistic governor of Oregon (where most of the tale is set) who hopes to exploit fears engendered by the terrorist attack in his bid for the presidency; Augustus Remington, Chase’s political strategist and aide de camp; Neal Desai, a biologist friend of Patrick’s father who has been working for decades on a lobos vaccine; Miriam, Claire’s aunt, who has defected from the lycan resistance movement that takes credit for the terrorist attacks; and Jeremy Saber, Claire’s ex-husband and the leader of the lycan resistance movement. The novel builds from the intersection of these and other characters’ lives. Patrick briefly falls in with a squad of violent anti-lycan skinheads, who call themselves ‘‘the Americans’’ and launch unprovoked attacks on lycan households, before befriending and becoming romantically entangled with Claire. Patrick’s father goes missing in the Lupine Republic, prompting his son to enlist and try to find him. Chase becomes infected with the lobos prion and struggles to hide this from the public until Neal, whose research his administration is subsidizing, can perfect a vaccine. And the resistance, responding to politically orchestrated abuses of lycan civil rights, plots increasingly audacious terrorist attacks.

  Percy’s novel has an epic sweep that the foregoing sketch of plots and subplots can only hint at. But it should be obvious from how some of the events described echo events of recent history – the AIDS epidemic; the 9/11 terrorist attacks; the war in Iraq – that Percy is really writing an allegorical history of our own world and times. Numerous other historical parallels shape lycan history in the novel, including early twentieth-century eugenics experiments, the civil rights movement, the ’60s Days of Rage, and the current ‘‘war on terror,’’ whose rhetoric Percy adapts brilliantly to his tale’s political arguments. His lycans are standins for any ‘‘other,’’ outsider group, or culture that is feared for not fitting in with the status quo.

  Percy’s prose style is lean and honed to perfection. It conveys an astonishing amount of detail in as few words as necessary. His descriptions of lycanthropic transformation are especially evocative: ‘‘Her bones stretch and bend and pop, and she yowls in pain, as if she is giving birth, one body coming out of another.’’ ‘‘Already she is retreating into her human form, and as always she feels small and bewildered and achy, like someone rising from a dreamscape to find herself gripped by a hangover.’’ ‘‘She has changed – she has opened up and tuned in to some dead transmission that has suddenly buzzed to life inside her and allowed in all the richness of the world.’’ There’s not a single word wasted in his telling of the story. At 500-plus pages, this novel doesn’t feel as long in the reading as many shorter novels do.

  Red Moon is an ambitious novel, and the extent of its ambitions are evident in several stunning plot twists that occur near the end of the book. For all of their surprises, they follow logically from Percy’s orchestration of his story’s events, and they show how, in skilled hands, a tale of the fantastic is a form of modern mythmaking.

  •

  The title of Joe Hill’s new novel appears on the front cover as the lettering of a vanity license plate, and plenty of readers who know nothing about horror fiction will pick up the reference to Nosferatu, F.W. Murnau’s loose cinematic adaptation of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. It’s not too hard to intuit from this that NOS4A2 has a vampire theme, though there’s much more going on in Hill’s novel than such subgenre pigeonholing might portend. This is a novel very much concerned with childhood innocence, its imperilment, and the sacrifice a parent will make in to protect it. In Vic McQueen, its main character and a mother of more formidable strength than any parent should have to exert, NOS4A2 also features one of the strongest and best-drawn female characters in recent horror fiction.

  When the novel opens in 1986, Vic is an eight-year-old living in Massachusetts, listening to a prickly spat her parents are having about her mother misplacing a bracelet that morning. In search of respite, Vic bikes away from their house and crosses the Shorter Way Bridge, a condemned covered bridge over the Merrimack River that her parents have forbidden her to go near. When she comes out the other side, she finds that she has been magically transported to the alley behind the New Hampshire sandwich shop where her family lunched earlier that day – and where her mother left her bracelet.

  Later, Vic is not terribly surprised to learn that the bridge had been torn down before she rode over it. She realizes that it is a construct of her imagination, one that bridges ‘‘the Lost and Found.’’ Over the next ten years, she exercises the wild talent it represents to find a number of other lost objects, each excursion taking a physical and mental toll on her so traumatic that her scrambled mind tries to convince her that they never happened. But some of her jaunts are more memorable than others. On one, she meets Maggie Leigh, a librarian with her own wild talent (reading fortunes in scrabble tiles), who will become Vic’s comrade in arms, and the person who first apprises her of Charlie Manx, the monster whose path Vic is destined to cross.

  Manx is a truly creepy piece of work, a walking incarnation of the stranger that kids are warned by their parents not to take rides from. He cruises the countryside in his 1938 Rolls-Royce Wraith, snatching children from their parents and spiriting them away to Christmasland, a realm of his own imaginative conjuring, somewhere ‘‘between reality and thought,’’ where it is always Christmas. By the time the children arrive at Christmasland, Manx has drained them of their souls, and they are as much horrifying perversions of what children should be as his Christmasland is a perversion of what a child’s world should be. For much of the novel, Manx is assisted by Bing Partridge, a dimwitted manchild who serves as his Renfield, and who, in his obsessive desire to be admitted to Christmasland himself, is a grotesque adult version of Manx’s zombified child victims. When, at age 17, Vic accidentally rides her bridge to Manx’s real home in Colorado and help
s to engineer his capture and imprisonment, it puts her and her son, Wayne, in Manx’s sights – and on the ‘‘naughty’’ side of Christmasland’s naughty/nice list – when he escapes 15 years later.

  Hill presents Vic as a complex mix of strength and vulnerability. Although she is beautiful and smart, her life turns into a mess as she struggles to navigate the schizoid reality of her world. After escaping from Manx with the help of Lou Carmody, a Harley-riding bear of a man, she shacks up with him and has his child out of wedlock at age 20. Over the next ten years she spirals into alcoholism and addiction and is institutionalized for depression. When she starts getting intimidating phone calls from the children stranded in Christmasland after Manx’s incarceration, she accidentally burns down her house trying to destroy all of the phones on the premises. It’s a credit to Hill’s skill at drawing her character that Vic is never less than sympathetic, a self-destructive victim who blames no one but herself for her problems. At certain points, Hill so perfectly conveys Vic’s bafflement and uncertainty about the reality of her supernormal experiences that the reader begins to wonder whether the events related haven’t all been hallucinations. From an early age, Vic has shown talent as an artist, and she ultimately channels her troubled psyche into a successful line of illustrated fantasy books for children, giving Hill the opportunity to reflect on the fine line separating imagination and madness.

  The price Vic pays the rest of her life for an extraordinary talent first expressed in childhood is itself a loss of innocence that Hill plays well off the greater loss of innocence hypostatized in Christmasland. Hill depicts the place as a sort of twisted Never-Never Land, whose residents are all suffering an arrested development that freezes them in demonic forms totally out of character with the saccharine-sweet wonderland that Manx represents it to be. The finale that unfolds when Vic is lured there by Manx for a final showdown with her kidnapped son, Wayne, as a pawn, is operatic in proportion and puts Vic through combat moves that bring out super-heroine qualities. It’s long, sustained, and a perfect pyrotechnic follow-through on everything that has preceded it. This is Hill’s third and most fully realized novel, and it’s an impressive testament to his growth and maturity as a fantasist.